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Earlier this month, an article raised the question of who owns the giant data center being built in Altoona, Iowa. Today, the Des Moines Register has an answer, gleaned from "legislative sources." The giant facility, estimated to cost $1.5 billion when construction is complete, is to house a data center for Facebook. The article lists various attributes the site has to make it attractive for all that data, including access to transportation, extensive network infrastructure, and relatively low risk from natural disasters.

you fail at reading comprehension. 1) the facility is being EXPANDED by 300000sqft to total 1.4m sqft. 2) a data center is obviously more complex and has more power and cooling requirements than an office tower.. and 3) the article mentions apple's 500k sq ft datacenter that cost 1billion... so this facility is not more expensive than other data centers.

Not to mention a data centre requires much more complex engineering for the systems installed inside of it. It has to be able to get a huge amount of electricity and handle that load, it must be properly and efficiently air conditioned. As well it's probably fitted with all kind of precautionary systems such as argon gas fire extinguishing so as to prevent data loss due to fire.

"...where leaders have provided a green light for a 1.4 million square foot facility. When completely built out, experts expect the facility will cost $1.5 billion."

Data centers have more strict code requirements than residential space, and need a much much more extensive cooling system, power system, power backup system, fire protection systems, etc. I'd imagine there is redundancy in just about every part of a data center as well. Building a data center is more equivalent to building a factory or chip fab

If the power goes out at my house for a few minutes, it doesn't hurt me. There's a 60% chance that I wouldn't even notice, if I'm not home or I'm asleep. Servers crash hard when their power goes out, so you have to have backup power. If my air conditioning goes out at home, again I probably won't notice if it only last a little while. Servers would be destroyed. When the air conditioning completely went out, I can get in the car and go get a replacement part. The car has AC, so I don't even get hot, it

There are a few differences in how the figures are compared here. With a commercial building like Trump World Tower, the figure is for semi-finished space. That's the cost to erect the main structure, build the lobby and other common areas, shell each office (4 walls and a dropped ceiling), and sell the space. It does not include the cost to fit out an individual office space. If you bought a floor and wanted it done in Marble, that would be on-top of the $300 million cost, paid by the tenant. It's not cost to the investors in Trump World Tower, so isn't in the $300M figure. If somewhere someone tallied all the construction and build out costs for all the tenants of that building, it would substantially higher.

In a single user data center, the costs to build include the shell, power and the fitment of the space. To use some official numbers from a builder in the data center marketplace, CBRE [www.cbre.us] suggests "Data center construction costs average $295 per square foot ($150 to $200 per SF shell, $12M to $18M per MW thereafter depending on the required design resiliency) ".

1.4 million square feet and $300 per, that's a $420M for a shell. I would hope a project of that size could get some economies of scale and come in at least 20% cheaper than that figure, but it really depends on some of the features a tenant might want.

I suspect you could run shell costs from near half that for a "bare bones" setup, to near double for some of the fancier features possible to add (biometrics on every door type bells and whistles).

The big question, is how much power (and cooling, they go together). Low power equipment might require 75 watts/square foot (105 MW), giving a power cost (using the low figure of $12M/MW) of 1.26 Billion; and high power equipment at 300W/square foot (420 MW) would be 5 Billion! Facebook has actually been a pioneer in reducing these costs with it's Open Compute [opencompute.org] project to make for more efficient setups. This should reduce their power cost well below the average, perhaps shaving 20-30% off that figure as well.

There's one last thing, what about servers? If it's a single tenant data center some folks might include the servers for such a data center. Conservatively 40 servers a rack, 30 square feet per rack, the building could house 1.86 million servers. At $5000/server, that would be another 9.3 billion!

Facebook claims just over a billion active users, or about 537 users/server, if this was their only data center. I'll let the rest of the crowd here debate if that's a reasonable amount of infrastructure per user, or too low, or too high.

FB says it has 800 million active accounts log in each month, if it had 1.86 million servers, that's ONLY 16 users PER SERVER PER DAY.

Like so many Facebook numbers, these numbers just don't add up. No way could they justify having 1 server to serve only 16 users each day. Lets be generous and say they use it 100 times a month, we're still looking at 1600 a day.

If this was their one and only server farm, then it would be $3 per user (1 billion users, at least half of which are fake accounts), and they have s

According to this [fb.com], there's 680 million logins per day.I couldn't find an official Facebook word on it, and the latest estimates [gigaom.com] are from last August, but they say a magnitude lower, 180k. I highly doubt that within 7 months there would be a 10 fold increase in server numbers.

So going by these numbers, there's 680.000k/180k = 3778 user/server/day. For a web server, this is pretty good number, as I can imagine, serving 3778 users is a sort of continuous thing, unlike many other websites. Notifications are polled pretty frequently, and as you scroll requests are made constantly to the servers.

I don't like Facebook, and I think this is a waste of energy and space for storing cat videos and sex-quizzes but the numbers in this case do add up.

Note that my 1.86 million figure made a couple of gigantic assumptions of 40 servers per rack, and 30 square feet per rack. It would be possible (physically) to do 10' or 11' racks, and get upwards of 60 servers in a rack. Blades (of which OpenCompute is sort of one) figures differently. This also assumes 100% servers, massive disk storage would take up space and power and reduce the number of servers.

Given what Facebook does I'm going to guess somewhere between 25-50% of the floor space is dedicated to

From my understanding, its multiple buildings. They're going to be pretty freaking huge, but still multiple buildings. Iowa already has tax incentives to help attract companies like Google and Microsoft. I'm not surprised that Facebook is building there. 2 separate power grids (with lots of wind energy), no flooding, you can build buildings to withstand some pretty powerful winds [ Take a tour of LightEdge's data center right across the Interstate to see for yourselves ] not to mention all the dark fibe

It is, just indirectly. Facebook does not care which Government agency buys data, who even who's Government for that matter. I'm sure to keep the money rolling in, they try not to step on any toes (without permission that is)

I grew up near Altoona. Google maps says 3 miles from the site of the data center. There is no chance of flooding in Altoona. As the name suggests, its a relatively high spot - and not near any rivers' flood plain. The biggest threat is tornadoes. Not nearly as much as Oklahoma, but we still have them. Look up Parkersburg, IA tornado of 2008 for a near town-wide leveling by an EF5 tornado.

Haven't driven past the site myself, but if they're smart, they'll have built like Wells Fargo did, datacenter underground. No tornado is going to destroy something below the wind path of destruction...

Statistically.... tornados are not a threat, it will be interesting to see where they put new powerlines.:)

There is already a big datacenter in Altoona by LightEdge that claims to be able to take an EF5....though...their generators are outside. There is actually a cool facility 30 miles north in Boone that is Uber Connected and in a retrofitted military bunker. www.infobunker.com

The campaign contributions and Job Creation(tm) that surely came with this thing would make any applicable politician say "LALALA I can't hear your legal quibbles over the rustles of ALL THE HIGH-VALUE RECTANGULAR LEAVES I SWEPT INTO MY CLOSET."

Iowa is a great spot for giving everyone in the US and Canada decent average latency. It's possible that they might be considering making a play for VoIP or real-time MMPGs or some other real-time interactive service.

Indeed. The spot where they chose is actually within spitting distance of a large datacenter by lightedge. It is also located on I-80 and within 2 miles of I-35. Heck, even Dice, the now owners of Slashdot, is located in Urbandale about 15 miles down the road by a large TDS/Team Datacenter.

A lot of the connections from East to West and North to South of North America go through Omaha and Des Moines. Just north of the facility, there is a datacenters with gobs of alternative connectivity that they get as